SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 23 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Woodroffe, Patrick
(1940-2014) UK illustrator, artist and author, whose academic background was in modern languages; he taught French and German for several years until the popularity of his paintings allowed him to focus exclusively on his art. His early sf book covers stood out for a number of reasons: an appealingly childlike aura, unusual creativity, meticulous attention to detail, and bright, surprising colours. It is difficult to single out particular examples, but his cover for the 1973 paperback edition ...
Lee, Stan
(1922-2018) US Comic-book writer, editor and executive, born Stanley Martin Leiber; his name was legally changed to Lee. Before World War Two he began to establish himself in the New York comics publishing world, in 1939 joining Timely Comics, Inc, the firm for which Jack Kirby invented Captain America in 1941. Lee remained with Timely – which soon became Atlas Comics, then ...
Picacio, John
(1969- ) US illustrator who graduated in 1992 from the University of Texas at Austin and practised as an architect for some years until, in 2001, becoming a full-time artist; since then he has published at least one book cover a month on average, producing also interior illustrations and others. His first book commission was for the 1996 30th-anniversary edition of Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man (September 1966 ...
Belson, Jordan
(1926-2011) US filmmaker who from 1947 created numerous short abstract films, often of a mystical or cosmic nature, as suggested by such titles as Mandala (1953), Cosmos (1969), Meditation (1971) and Infinity (1980). The closest to sf is Re-entry (1964), which includes snippets of astronaut John Glenn's radio communications alongside rather beautiful images of abstract colour and light to evoke the experience of ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...